Comedian Jesse Nutt returns to Wiley's, where it all began

Jesse Nutt

Comedian Jesse Nutt was 19 years old when he first started visiting Wiley’s Comedy Niteclub in the early 1980s. However, he admits it took him several visits before he could work up the nerve to actually enter the venue.

“I sat in the parking lot for like three weeks trying to get up the courage to go in there and ask if I could do comedy,” Nutt said. “It was something I always wanted to do. I always knew I’d be doing this, but I basically spent most of my 18th year trying to get up the courage to actually get on stage and do it.”

Original owner Dan “Wiley” Lafferty had Nutt sign up for the club’s open mic night and offered encouragement to the fledgling comic.

“Wiley let me go up,” he said. “After that he seemed to think I had something, so he let me keep coming back. It just went from there and the rest, as they say, is history.”

Now 46 and the father of three daughters, ages 12, 21 and 23, Nutt has plenty of tales of the trouble and strife fatherhood provides, but that’s only a portion of his act. As an avid student of human behavior and a junkie for current events, he also deals heavily with topical material.

“I talk about family, but I also talk a lot about national politics, local politics, too,” Nutt said. “I love Dayton. I was born and raised here. I travel all over the place, but this is where I’ll always be because Dayton is a perfect example of everything that is happening all over the country.”

Nutt returns to Wiley’s Thursday through Saturday, April 1-3.

“I’ll have a lot of new material,” he said. “If you’ve seen me before, I can guarantee more than half of what you’ll hear will be new stuff you haven’t heard or seen on YouTube.”